International mumming in the UK and Cambodia

Kids and drugs

My unforeseen success with An Open Letter to Flop has totally fucked me over. I’ve been unable to write anything since and instead I simply read the entire internet. There are a lot of really boring bastards out there. In lieu of actually writing anything new, I’m attempting to get the ball rolling by simply posting this drivel from last year which I found in the arse end of my computer. Enjoy!

Last week* whilst feeding the ducks (with my toddler) I found myself in the unfortunate position of being duty bound to reprimand some 10 year old kids for smoking. I was prevented from completing this task initially by the fact that I am scared of kids and latterly by my realisation that the ringleader of this motley crew, this sinister Pan leading lost boys from cradle to gallows, was in fact VAPING.

I usually harbour the illusion that I understand kids because I recently was one. In a similar way, I believe teaching must be simple and I could do it as I have been to school before. This attitude unites kids and teachers in the accurate belief that parents are all dickheads.

I now see that I do not understand kids.

These kids have literally cut out the middle man in their nicotine addiction journey.

They haven’t even picked up a cigarette and they’ve already quit.

Can you even tell a kid off for vaping?! Is it even technically naughty? Ought I to have clapped this child on the shoulder conspiratorially, chuckling “good for you love, I’m two years off the cigs myself and I wouldn’t go back if you paid me!”, perhaps done a few demonstrative deep breaths to really drive the point home?

What happens to the traditional slippery slope of gateway drugs when the kids have bypassed the real shit and gone straight for the replacement therapy? It’s now a short, sharp, steep step from vaping to knocking back methadone in the pharmacy. The traditional spliff-to-intravenous-in-6-short-months trajectory nothing but a shadow of a memory.

If they’re standard vaping at 10, what the hell will they be on at 11? These kids begin with the same equipment as every adult female long-term vaper I know: a standard, basic e-cig. Subtle, simple, easily confused with a biro. The men, on the other hand, carry around a sort of electronic briefcase, which they transform into a saxophone-computer, impossible quantities of smoke billowing out of their smug o-shaped mouths, pointed to the sky, like some sort of one-man steam train meets nuclear power station.

I despair for the youth of today.

Their hedonistic mind-expansion landscape is a bleak and barren land.

A minefield of legal highs which create the kind of buzz which makes you want to rip your own testicles off. Literally.

Gone are the halcyon days of chain smoking roll ups while riding the serotonin tsunami, dubstep and Stevie Wonder’s greatest hits providing an incongruous backing track for the euphoric realisation that we are all just the children of the family of the world, man.

I don’t know what the point of this blog was but just to confirm that I’ve glorified the use of drugs and also pretended to have ever had a positive experience involving dubstep.